IT recruiting

How to Get Recruited for IT Jobs

If you’re searching for new IT jobs over the year, you may be wondering how to connect with IT staffing firms and technical recruiters.  The good news is that it’s pretty easy to get the attention of good IT recruiters and IT recruiting agencies.  Here are some steps you can take:

  1. Contact IT recruiting companies yourself.  Call the main line, email their info number or reach out on LinkedIn.  Most IT staffing agencies welcome calls, emails, and contact from candidates.
  2. Make yourself visible online.  Make sure you have a profile on LinkedIn, Monster, and other job searching sites.  Post your resume so IT staffing companies can easily find you as they search for particular skills.
  3. Go to networking events, particularly ones that list a lot of recruiters who plan to attend.  Bring copies of your resume and/or business cards to hand out to IT staffing companies who may be there.

Keep This in Mind for Your IT Resume

Technical Recruiters and IT staffing firms all offer a lot of advice on fixing up resumes.  Your IT recruiters may give you advice on formatting, content, or even proofread your resume.  Some of this advice is objective, but sometimes it’s simply tied to the preferences of their particular IT recruiting firms.  Here’s one rule of thumb that aIl IT Staffing Companies would agree on, though: treat the space on your resume as very valuable– particularly on the top of the page.

What does this mean?  For both the IT staffing agencies and hiring managers who look at your resume, time is precious.  This means that these IT recruiting companies might only take a few minutes to check out your resume.  Knowing this, you should edit your resume down to its most concise form.  This ensures that everything gets seen and given ample consideration.  You should also put the most important parts of your resume first, because they will likely be given the most consideration.  Put things like your summary and technical proficiencies first.  These give hiring managers and IT recruiting firms a quick answer to the most important question for them: can you probably do this job?

 

Build Your Best IT Resume

There’s no shortage of advice on how to build resumes that attract IT recruiting firms and win IT jobs.  For most IT professionals, this is probably overwhelming—some advice conflicts.  Even more confusing, some of this conflicting advice comes from competing IT recruiting companies and IT recruiters.  So how do you sort through the tips from all the technical recruiters and IT staffing agencies and actually build a great resume?

Firstly, try not to get overwhelmed.  Even if advice conflicts, it’s probably not going to make a staggering difference if you take some IT recruiters’ advice over others.  The important stuff, the actual content of your resume, will probably overshadow any formatting choices you make.

Secondly, make sure to check over your resume and ask IT staffing companies to do the same for you.  The more times people check for errors, the better.  Getting the best formatting for your resume is nice, but it’s more important to have something that’s as close to error-free as possible.

Lastly, try focusing on results.  When you list bullets for a job, list your achievements.  When you describe your career, think about achievements you can provide.  No matter what format tricks you use, these results are what will shine through to hiring managers.

Improving Communication Skills for IT Jobs

As expected, IT staffing firms and IT recruiters prize technical skills in a candidate when staffing for IT jobs. It’s important to know that communication skills are nearly equally important for some IT recruiting companies and the jobs they’re filling.  Here are some tips for cultivating communication skills that will impress IT recruiting firms, technical recruiters, and hiring managers.

  1. Keep in mind the perspective of the other person.  When you show that you care about others’ wants and needs, they’re more likely to connect with you.  This makes for better communication and better relationships (which can be key at work).
  2. Keep the playing field even.  Whether you have more degrees, success, a better, title, etc, is irrelevant.  Coworkers, bosses, and IT staffing agencies will respect you more if you show respect to them and treat them as an equal.
  3. Listen more than you speak.  It might take practice, but listening pays off.  People appreciate this deeply and they will appreciate you more if you can be a good listener for them.

 

2 Times to be Honest, but Edit Yourself in IT Job Interviews

All IT staffing firms would certainly agree that honesty is important in interviews for IT jobs.  If you’re not honest as a candidate or the company is dishonest, you’ll wind up in a job you’re not able to do well or are unhappy in.  Nobody wins in this case– not the hiring managers, candidate, or IT staffing agencies and IT recruiters. There are some times when it’s best to walk the line between honesty and editing yourself, though.  Here are two instances in interviews when technical recruiters would advise you to be honest, but edit yourself.

First is when your priority is your family, not work.  Most IT staffing companies and hiring managers know that it’s likely your family time is more precious to you than time spent at work.  However, you don’t have to say this out loud.  It underscores the point too much and might scare off the interviewer.  Most interviewers won’t ask about this topic anyways.  In this case it’s all the better to avoid making strong statements about how you prioritize family over work.

Second is when you’re leaving a job because your boss or coworkers were difficult to deal with.  Again, this is the kind of thing that IT recruiting companies know happens.  However, when you speak ill of a boss or colleagues, you make a poor impression on interviewers.   There are a few reasons for this, but the most important is that it’s hard for them to know if your complaints are valid. Keep the conversation positive and focus on what you’re looking for in your next job.

 

IT Jobs, Danger and Responsibility: The Story of Pavel Durov

Most IT recruiters and IT staffing firms wouldn’t describe IT jobs as dangerous.  This is, of course, the case, 99% of the time.  Recently, though, IT staffing agencies and technical recruiters have been shown an exception: the wild story of a very dangerous IT job—being creator of Russia’s version of Facebook.

Pavel Durov, a celebrity in Russia on par with Mark Zuckerberg in the US, has recently become endangered due to issues between the government and his company.  While Russia’s own issues with corruption and censorship weigh heavily on this story, there’s another message for IT recruiting companies and IT recruiting agencies: IT is a powerful industry with a great deal of responsibility and power.  As it begins to truly shape our world and deeply affect our politics, Information Technology endows its jobs with a great deal of ethical responsibility.  IT professionals, and by extension, IT staffing companies, are not just coding—they’re deeply influencing the future.

 

Tips for IT Office Parties

As the holidays approach, plenty of IT staffing agencies and IT companies will be having office parties.  These may seem unnecessary, but they’re actually a great moment for you to network with technical recruiters, colleagues, and possibly increase your chances of landing IT jobs in the future.  Here are a few tips from IT staffing firms to help you ace your holiday office parties.

Firstly, be a little more casual and comfortable.  Events like this don’t call for exactly the same manners, dress code, etc as work.  In fact, if you’re too stiff, it will be detrimental.  IT recruiting agencies would recommend relaxing a bit, making a few jokes, and coming in clothes that aren’t quite business professional.

Second, don’t bring your smart phone with you and don’t cling to your date.  IT staffing companies would suggest that the best way to make the most of holiday parties for work is to be fully engaged.  Don’t spend long spans of the party checking your phone in the corner.  Don’t only speak with your date.  Work the room and be social with your coworkers and managers—it’s the reason you’re at the party.

Don’t indulge too much on the alcohol.  It seems like common sense, but it’s worth repeating.  IT recruiting firms would absolutely recommend keeping your drinking to a minimum so you’re fully in control for the whole evening.

 

 

Ace your IT Interviews by Telling Stories

IT staffing firms and IT recruiters are always looking for job candidates who excel in ways beyond just their technical skills.  Having certain skill-sets might make it seem like somebody is a great fit for particular IT jobs.  Howevever, it’s important for IT staffing companies and technical recruiters to be able to present candidates who not only have great IT skills and experience, but are able to demonstrate they’re excellent assets to their teams and managers.  How do you demonstrate to IT recruiting firms, interviewers, and hiring managers, that you’re an asset to the teams you work on and will work on in the future?  Tell some stories.

Tell IT recruiting agencies or interviewers a story about a time you stepped up and owned a process, fixed a problem, or did something else that was out of your job description.  Talk about how this affected your team and managers (positively, obviously) and what you learned from it.  These kinds of stories will demonstrate initiative, follow-through, team-work, and reliability.

Tell IT staffing companies or a hiring manager a story about a time you met somebody’s expectations—before they even expected it.  Maybe you anticipated a manager’s need, headed off a potential problem with a project, or were just prepared for something your team wasn’t.  These kinds of stories demonstrate that you are not only capable of doing your job, but doing it with little supervision.  This is a manager’s dream.

 

Why Use IT Recruiting Firms?

Ever wondered why IT recruiters are useful in your search for IT jobs?  Why not just do the search yourself instead of working with IT recruiting companies?  There are few reasons you should cultivate a relationship with technical recruiters—some of which are not obvious.

Firstly, IT recruiting companies have access to far more job openings than you do as the average job seeker.  Not all job openings are posted publicly.  Sometimes hiring managers have IT staffing companies working on a job that you may not even know exists.  Working with them means you will know about them and be able to apply.

Secondly, IT recruiting agencies have strong relationships with the companies they’re working for.  This means they can recommend you (as somebody whose expertise the hiring managers trust), make sure your resume doesn’t get lost in a stack of resumes, and even fight for you to get the salary or pay rate you want.  All these benefits are hard to put a price on, but they’re very important in a competitive job market.

Don’t Stop Your IT Job Search During the Holidays

As the holidays approach, IT recruiters and IT staffing firms are fighting the common myth that it’s not worth keeping up a job search until after New Year’s.  This misconception drives IT staffing agencies crazy because it’s simply not true—there are still plenty of IT jobs in November and December that they’re working to fill. Here are two reasons why you should keep working with IT recruiting companies and IT recruiters all the way through the holiday season.

Firstly, a surprising number of companies find extra cash in their budgets that they need to spend before the year’s end.  This means new projects, possibly even new IT positions that are temporary or permanent.  If you pick up your calls from technical recruiters during the holidays, you could be one of the IT professionals who gets hired with this unexpected money.

Secondly, Even if a company does not find money in the budget they must spend, they may lose workers over the course of the holiday season.  Workers will sometimes wait out a year-end bonus, and then leave a job.  IT staffing companies could be calling you to fill that spot.